Office 2016 for Mac is released

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Posted by Paul Korm
Jul 9, 2015 at 06:53 PM

Office 365 subscribers can now install release of Office 2016 (Excel, Word, etc.) (No longer beta.) It’s pretty much the iPad version ported to OS X—with more menu items, and “simplified” ribbons. The results is a cleaner UI with more room for document content. In Word, there are some odd new graphical artifacts—when documents are zoomed they expand to a larger blurry image that gradually comes into focus. If someone spent time designing that as a intended “feature” I’d wonder why.

I think file management in the iPad Office apps is strange—I don’t see why every time a document is saved it has be written back to the OneDrive cloud. It’s like Microsoft decided to compete with Google Drive but keep the thick client as the front end. Office 2016 for Mac has the same interface, same behavior with open / save. If you want to open / save something on a local drive the 2016 applications abandon the new interface and flip open the standard OS X Finder interface.

I haven’t yet discovered any features that are actually new or improved.

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